


On A Rainy Monday

by beetle



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: M/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 10:49:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beetle/pseuds/beetle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the slashthedrabble prompt "sore," and heavily inspired by the song of a the same title, by Shiny Toy Guns. It was literally the song playing on my YouTube playlist when I started brainstorming for the prompt. I-p-i-t-y, my friends . . . but gone rather askew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On A Rainy Monday

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I just had fun. Didn't make a profit.  
> Notes: Set post-Voyager. Sorta. Implied slash. Spoilers for ST:V ep. 7.19, “Q2”.

Another ungodly-early morning commute. . . .  
  
It's drizzling heavily enough to be annoying, but not enough to use the umbrella he'd uncharacteristically forgotten home. He'd been too busy stealing another sleepy kiss . . . then another . . . then another, until the home/Luka-scents of pot, patchouli, and incense are branded onto his hippocampus.  
  
Perhaps the bloom will eventually wilt off the rose, or however the axiom goes, but for now, married life agrees with him. Though he loves his work (innovative security software really  _does_ write itself), the very best part of every day is, undoubtedly, Luka's welcome home-kiss, waiting for him at the  _end_  of it. . . .  
  
“Eons lived and lost, Itchy, and you still walk around with your head in the clouds,” a fond, richly amused voice notes, and Icheb Brunali barely halts his stride to avoid colliding with--someone.  
  
As it is, he's forced to pinwheel his arms in a way that's likely comical, simply to avoid overbalancing. Strong hands grab and steady him, keep him from landing ass-first in the muddy puddle he'd been standing in. His glasses, however, aren't spared such ignominy, and hit the ground at his feet with a sharp, worrying tinkle.  
  
Despite the rain, the day  _had_  been looking up. . . .  
  


*

  
  
He blinks rain out of his eyes and squints at the smiling blur. One of the hands on his arm disappears, then warm, dry fingers brush his cheek almost . . . tenderly.  
  
Icheb flinches away. The puddle, once more, seems to be a distinct possibility, but for the effortlessly steadying hand still grasping his elbow.  
  
“I--I beg your pardon, but--?”  
  
“Do you know me?” The stranger snorts, and both hands disappear, as does their owner. But a second later, he's reappeared in blurry glory, his hands moving toward Icheb's face. “Yes, you do. Better than anyone--but I'd be slipping in my old age, if you remembered  _that_.”  
  
”What--” Icheb protests, as his glasses--improbably unbroken and impossibly  _dry_ \--are settled on his face. He wrinkles his nose and blinks again, getting his first clear look at this tactilely forward stranger.  
  
He's  _young. Jailbait_  would be Luka's half-wistful term. This boy  _can't_  be more than seventeen. His dark hair sweeps indifferently back from a high, smooth brow, and his clear brown eyes are . . . far, far too avid and knowing for his strong-featured, but ultimately unfinished face.  
  
His  _familiar_  face.  
  
“See something you like?” The boy grins rakishly and that's when Icheb places it. Some similarity in this boy's disturbingly sensual smile reminds him of Luka. Makes him feel as if there's something he doesn't understand. Something obvious and important.  
  
It's a rare enough sensation for Icheb and, except when it  _is_  Luka-related, fairly discomfiting.  
  
”Uh. You--” he starts, unusually flustered and suddenly needing to take a step back.  
  
“Of course. And though I appreciate the sentiment, you're off by a few letters.” The boy matches Ycheb's step back with a step forward. They are, oddly enough, of a height, though the boy is more solidly built. “But, to business: how are you these days, Icheb?”  
  


*

  
  
“I  _beg_  your pardon, but . . . who are you?”  
  
“ _You_ , begging  _my_  pardon?” The boy rolls his eyes and heaves a theatrical (bordering on flaming) sigh. “ _C'est tout simplement_ incroyable! And to  _think_ , all I had to do to get you to this point was rewrite whole universes! Not that I'm fishing for compliments or pats on the back, mind--”  
  
“ _That's enough._ " Icheb glances around irritably, quite embarrassed to be causing a scene in his quiet, pre-dawn neighborhood. But, at six-thirty a.m., there's no one around to see them. There never is, until he's reached the light-rail station. "Who.  _Are_. You? Other than someone who's clearly in love with the sound of his own voice?”  
  
“Oh, I beg  _your_  pardon! Allow me to introduce myself.” That coy smile turns into a smirk, and the boy leans closer. Much too close for Icheb's liking, but he can't seem to step back or turn away. Warm, dry hands cup his face--a minor miracle on such a cool, damp morning. . . .  
  
Rather like the kiss Icheb should be stopping, but isn't.  _Can't_ , and wouldn't even if he wanted to. It's the merest press of slightly chapped lips on his own, but he knows he's never been kissed like this before--never come over in goosebumps, and  _shook_  as if  _electrified_  from such an inconsequential peck.  
  
(Never, in his most intimate, loving moments with Luka, even on his wedding day, has he felt--nor will he ever feel--a fraction of the synergy elicited by this simple kiss, and yet. . . .  
  
 _Wrong . . . I have to stop this_. He mentally cudgels his unresponsive-- _mostly unresponsive_ \--flesh.)  
  
“Billions of years I've waited to do that. It was . . . anticlimactic.” The boy stares deeply into Icheb's eyes from his vantage-point of too-damned-close. “It's curious, though. I'd sworn to myself I'd . . . misplaced the exact shade of grey your irises are. How they shade to hazel near the pupil when you're aroused. . . .. . . .”  
  
That insouciant grin, bright and empty as sunshine, irreverent for irreverence's sake, changes tenor. There's a yawning pit behind it,  _and_  those eyes. An abyss that's nevertheless brimming with loneliness Icheb can't conceive of, except . . . he  _can_.  
  
 _Q-Ball_ , he thinks, and it's a knife in his gut that's apropos of . . . everything.  
  
“Universes have come and gone, Icheb, and here I finally stand before you: reduced, as it were, to the heart-sore lover once more--and I don't even  _have_  a heart, despite what you liked to think, once upon a time. . . .” the boy laughs ruefully. For a moment, he's . . . ancient. “I miss-- _we_. . . miss you. Come back to us.”  
  


*

  
  
“'We'? 'Us'?” Icheb sways closer, junkie-helpless to do anything but  _need that kiss_ , and the feeling that came with it.  
  
And this odd, crazy boy eagerly obliges him.  
  
For a moment, everything else--the rain, the chill, the steel-wool silence of a thousand morning commutes--ceases to exist. There's only soft, chapped lips on his own again, that initial  _zing!_  of rightness.  
  
Then there's something  _more_ , something bigger, also heretofore unexperienced. It's like riding the fastest, highest roller-coaster (normally Icheb deplores roller-coasters, finds them risky and illogical) and in that moment, borne on the back of that thrill, is the  _everything_  that  _Q-Ball_  is apropos of.  
  
Icheb, formerly of the Brunali, remembers:  
  
Remembers the great, encompassing, self-contained  _Continuum_ , and remembering?  _Hurts_. Even the best memories (eons spent incorporeally entwined with this  _eternal boy_ , this brotherloverfriendrivalalphaomega . . . with no agenda other than simple enjoyment of each other)  _hurt_ , because it's all so big, and strange and  _complete_.  
  
Even though for a brief, halcyon eternity he, too, was both big and strange and complete.  
  
“Yes,” Q agrees on his lips, something too warm to be the persistent drizzle wetting their faces. “You can't  _possibly_  be happy, living this boring, plebeian little life, in this boring, plebeian little corner of space-time I've carved out for you, my darling--can't hide in  _mortality_  forever! I think you'll find your mortal body's expiration date is somewhat nearer than  _that_. . . .”  
  
“You still talk too much, Q-Ball.”  
  
“You still don't talk  _enough_ , Itchy.”  
  
“You're still a bad kisser.”  
  
“I . . . only because such base carnalities are beneath us both, Q . . . but especially beneath  _me_ ,” Q sniffs, then proceeds to belie that statement. Badly, but still better than any kiss Icheb's ever experienced, because this  _is Q_.  
  
 _You were Q, too, dunce,_  reverberates through his being, impossibly accepting and impossibly perfect--everything Icheb ever wanted or  _could_  want.  
  
There was never a need for anything but simply this, was there? Never a need for anything that wasn't Q?  
  
(It'd been at least several billion years before the ennui set in--before it'd wrapped Icheb in a cocoon of numb that never went away, never abated, only grew and fed off him until simply existing was to be locked in an iron maiden that's always closing, but never completely shuts. . . .)  
  
He breaks free of the Continuum for the second and last time. Turns away, falling to his knees to be violently ill in Mrs. Brzinski's gardenias . . . then collapses onto his side half on her well-manicured lawn, glasses lost to a cooling puddle of vomit.  
  
“Well, I suppose that answers my question,” Q drawls without inflection, and each word rips at Icheb's mind, like claws made of perfect despair, sharpened by time immemorial. He curls into a ball, hiding his face.  
  
“Put me back,” he begs, voice cracking--sanity fissuring. “Now, Q. Please.”  
  
Iron-maiden silence. Eternities worth.  
  
 _\--notagainnotagainratherdieputmeback--_  
  
“I only ever wanted you to be happy, my darl--”  
  
“ _Please put me back!_ ” Icheb screams out the last of his sanity on Mrs. Brzinski's lawn.  _"Please!"_  
  
Q's consciousness envelopes his own, familiarmissedgrievingcruellovingmercifulsoothing _only_  . . . and beloved.  _Always_.  
  
That creates the worst fissures of all--  
  


*

  
  
Another drizzling, ungodly-early commute.  
  
Icheb'd been too busy kissing a sleepy Luka good-bye (and good-bye, and good-bye) to remember his umbrella. But the trade-off is fair, and despite that axiom about roses and the duration of their blooms, married life is the  _good_  life. Being part of something larger than himself, something that's  _forever_  is. . . .  
  
. . . kinda like being barreled into by some kid, and falling on his ass.  
  
Reddened,  _empty_  dark eyes, in a long, miserable rictus of a face, meet Icheb's then skitter away. The kid sets his jaw and hurries on.  
  
“I'm fine, but thanks for your concern!” Icheb calls after him, then sighs. Though his raincoat is probably muddy, at least he narrowly avoided that damned  _puddle_.  
  
He picks himself up and smiles crookedly, wryly, imagining explaining his dirty coat to Luka later. . . .  
  
Imagines kissing Luka hello (and hello and hello).  
  
Icheb resumes his walk, eager to start the day. Though he loves his work (writing security software is not only meaningful and interesting, but  _lucrative_. In a few months they can begin seriously looking for the dream-home in Lake Oswego . . . maybe even talk about some children to fill it), the very best part of every day is,  _undoubtedly_ , Luka's welcome home-kiss waiting for him at the end of it.


End file.
